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Posts Tagged “Mage”

The very busy Ghostcrawler has now posted some upcoming changes for mages. All this stuff (and the hunter changes I listed yesterday) will be tested on the PTR first, so there might be more changes on the way. By the sounds of it though, mages are getting buffed. I’ll leave it at that before I say anything that sounds bitter ;)

The buffs here are designed primarily to make Arcane more competitive with Fire / Frostfire builds in PvE. Because they could end up buffing Arcane in PvP, we are prepared to adjust the damage of say Arcane Barrage if needed, but we want to see these in action on the PTR first.

Mage PvE damage in general is something we are keeping a close eye on. With the recent hunter changes, many of which were nerfs to PvE damage, we want to make sure mages now don’t break away from the pack of damage-dealing specs.

1) Evocation – cooldown reduced to 4 min.
2) Arcane Flows – now also reduces the cooldown of Evocation by an additional 1 / 2 min.
3) Arcane Blast – overhauled. Will now increase the damage of your next Arcane spell by 15%. However using Arcane Blast itself does not consume the charge, but instead increases the mana of your next Arcane Blast, up to a maximum of 3 stacks (and a 45% buff). You can alternate Blast and Barrage to keep buffing Barrage, or you can build Blast up higher for a heavy mana cost.
4) Torment the Weak – now works with Arcane Blast and does bonus damage to targets afflicted by any kind of slowing effect (e.g. Thunder Clap).
5) Elemental Precision – renamed Precision and now works on all spells.
6) Improved Blizzard – snaring effect reduced to 20/40/50%.

EDIT: We recently made the Arcane Blast stack 15/30/45% to your next Arcane spell.

Also a later post for clarification on the Arcane Blast thing:

I’ll try to explain this better. It sounds more confusing than it is. Here is the tooltip:

Blasts the target with energy, dealing X Arcane damage. Each time you cast Arcane Blast, the damage of all Arcane spells is increased by 15% and mana cost of Arcane Blast is increased by 200%. Effect stacks up to 3 times and lasts 10 sec or until any Arcane damage spell except Arcane Blast is cast.

I’d have updated with the last couple of glyphs I’ve learnt except they were just a couple of Death Knight ones ergo pretty useless to anyone but me and I didn’t even want them for my baby Death Knigget. But today I found something that’s not so much useful, but fun. Well, fun for Marlokh anyway since this is a Mage glyph: Glyph of the Penguin.

Wowhead has some screenshots of the penguin and they’re pretty cute. Being sheeped in PvP is annoying enough without looking like an adorable little penguin with huge Kewpie doll eyes. There’s one on the third tab of the Guild Bank should you feel a burning need to turn people into penguins.